I’m glad to see there’s been a reduction in BVD incidence as part of the eradication scheme. We had two obvious BVD cases over the years. It says enough that we still remember them.

They were two animals that never moved forward. After the last animal in 2005 we began vaccinating and, thankfully, as a result of taking part in the voluntary testing scheme have been clear for three years.

Compared with the Aujesky’s disease eradication in pigs, there doesn’t seem to be the same buy-in from cattle owners to getting rid of a performance-hitting disease. There’s been compensation of some sort available for persistently infected (PI) animals for the last two years. Yet some farmers still insist on holding on to PI calves. It might be minuscule, but it would make more sense to compensate farmers who comply. I’d love to know what the plan is for those of us who have three clean years done as the 2015 calving is almost 100 days away. I imagine the scheme will drag on a few years longer due to the actions of a few.

Sometimes it takes things to go wrong to force you to act. 2013 was a case in point on this farm for a number of reasons. A calf mortality rate of 18.8% tells its own story. We lost almost an Irish suckler herd’s worth of calves. This needed investigation to solve the issues. In dairy farming, any cell count or yield issue will show up with each collection; in beef you have to look yourself and it pays in terms of performance. We asked what had happened differently and how do we prevent it. Three calves were born dead and three deaths occurred indirectly due to rumen fluke.

A lack of thrive in heifers and young cows in the spring set off alarm bells. They had been on newly leased ground that got flooded and dung samples revealed a rumen fluke issue. Animals tested on the home block proved clear. Last October I still wasn’t happy with how animals there were thriving, so blood samples were taken. Three samples from random cows on the rented ground and three from home. It showed up a high copper deficiency in the group on the out-farm. They had access to minerals this year and thankfully all is back on track. Blood, dung and soil samples are now annual events to help the decision-making process.

We lost eight calves due to rotavirus. It puzzled us and our vets as to where it came from. One possibility was that it came from cattle returned by a buyer in the mart. It turned out to be an extremely costly return to us so to prevent the risk of this happening again a decision was made to finish all stock in future.

In 2010, our system was selling 11-14 month store bullocks. We sold 31 with an average sale weight of 392kg that April. By mid-June 2014, all bulls had been finished at 14.5 months with a carcase of 337kg. Not spectacular but we were content with our first effort with only four having a fat score of under 2=. It’s costing in the range of €150-180/head extra in feed for the extra six to eight weeks longer they’re on farm, but sale value is considerably higher. Not spectacular, but simple and not labour intensive. Each individual reacts to adversity in different ways, but finding out what the problem is and fixing it is better than blaming everyone else.